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Written by Alice Ryder Being asked to read a few pages for homework may sound like a chore, but imagine reading more than five million books. That’s what Slovenian physicist Matjaz Perc did to investigate how the use of words in the English language has changed over time.

Chemical formulas, such as H2O (water) and CO2 (carbon dioxide), are handy as they identify which atoms are present in a chemical compound. This can in turn help to make predictions about their properties. But only knowing which atoms make up a compound sometimes isn’t enough. It helps to know how the atoms are arranged.

Follow these instructions and create a work of art out of bubbles, while learning some maths.

If you read scientific reports closely, you will come across words such as error and uncertainty. What do they mean? If a teacher tells you that you made an error on a test, then you got something wrong. In everyday language, that’s what error often means – a mistake.

Written by Emma Bastian How do you weigh a dinosaur? It’s a simple question with a very complex answer.

A few months ago, scientists from the Large Hadron Collider announced they had found a new particle, one that could be the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle is thought to have properties explaining how other particles have mass. But the first signs of this new particle were detected over a year ago.

Imagine a flat spiral, similar to a snail’s shell, coming closer and closer to a point. Now imagine more spiral lines, all centred on the same point. This shape looks like the clouds over a cyclone, or a whirling galaxy.